The Folly Cove Designers came together in 1941, emerging “out of the granite of Cape Ann,” as one designer put it. Members of the collective carved designs into linoleum, then printed the designs on fabric to sell as table linens, draperies, and clothing, acquiring a national reputation for excellence in block printing and for depicting their local environments with passion and humor.

For nearly three decades, these designer/printmakers lived and worked in “the space between,” between art and craft and home and work, giving life to their designs by making careful note of and then repeating the patterns of the everyday, marking the beauty inherent in what and how they lived.

While few in the group self-identified as artists, they produced work of great beauty, complicating as others would the divide between art and craft and between individual and collective production. The Folly Cove Designers and their work provide a valuable glimpse into the world of handicrafts and handicraft practitioners in coastal New England in the interwar, wartime, and postwar years. Their story also provides an invaluable means of exploring a variety of related issues, including immigrant life, gendered work, and the nature of community.

At left: Aino Clarke jumping on a block. Photograph by Gerda Peteric.

Zaidee and Her Kittens, Virginia Lee Demetrios

Gulls, Lee Natti

Jennifer Scanlon is Interim Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. A historian with a scholarly focus in U.S. women’s history, Scanlon has published widely and for a variety of audiences.

This month Oxford University Press released her most recent book, Until There is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, which provides the first biography of civil rights stalwart Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a remarkable—and remarkably understudied—civil rights leader, educator, speaker, social service worker, policy maker, and politician. Hedgeman, who played a key role in over half a century of social justice initiatives, exemplifies the links between civil rights, women’s rights, and faith-based activism in what scholars now often refer to as the long civil rights movement.

​Scanlon’s last book, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, which explores the working-class roots of Brown’s controversial form of feminism, was named a “Book of the Times” by the New York Times and a business book of the year by American Public Media’s Marketplace. It received significant acclaim in publications ranging from People magazine to the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly to the Wall Street Journal. Professor Scanlon serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has served as Executive Director of the Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH), an affiliate of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH).